Natalja’s Stories

Danish writer Christensen (Azorno), who died in 2009, weaves a spellbinding surrealist narrative of memory, destiny, and illusion in seven linked tales involving Natalja, a woman born in late-19th-century Russia. It begins with Natalja’s mother, Marie, a young servant in Copenhagen who elopes to Russia with her suitor, silk trader Alexander Firenko, while secretly pregnant with Natalja, the result of an affair with a gardener. Years later, during the Russian Revolution, Alexander is killed, and Marie flees the country with Natalja. After Marie dies on the journey, Natalja resolves to bury her ashes in Denmark, transporting them in Marie’s treasured Chinese crock-pot. Subsequent tales shuffle and blur the identities of grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter, as Natalja’s granddaughter, a young Parisian woman also named Natalja, gets involved with an older man who may have been her mother and grandmother’s lover, too. The slippage and echoing of the women’s identities serve as intriguing parallels to the elderly Natalja’s attempts to get her story straight. As her granddaughter narrates, “It was as if she were trying to make her entire life disappear into the story... but new riddles, new people and incidents, continued to surface.” This beautiful collection is a testament to the inexhaustible possibilities of storytelling. (May)